In Pursuit of “The Good”: some provisional reflections on the origins and nature of a university

I wish to do five things in this paper. First, I want to say something about the debate concerning the nature of a university, as prompted by Newman’s well-known analysis; second, I hope to show that Newman’s vision of the university embodies the idea of the individual and collective “Good” as envisaged by the Greeks; third, I examine some contemporary views of the kind of university education thought to be worthwhile; fourth, I aim to explore MacIntyre’s highly critical conception of the modern liberal university as a place of “unconstrained agreement”, in contrast to the notion of the modern pre-liberal university as a place of ‘constrained agreement’. In doing so, I wish to give an account of his proposal that a university, instead, should be a place of “constrained disagreement” within which students and others are initiated into various arenas of cultural, ideological and curricular competition and conflict. In agreeing, broadly, with MacIntyre’s argument, the paper ends on a rather bleak note, echoing Readings’ fairly recent and now famous analysis of the modern university as a place “in ruins”